Anchor text is the text used to describe a link when turning it into a hyperlink using HTML or XHTML coding. For example, if a web page had a link which the web page creator wishes to hide under text, the HTML code will turn a word or a phrase into anchor text, and that will work just like a normal link would. Anchor text is a valuable search engine optimization tool because the word or phrase used in anchor texts can pertain directly to the landing page content, or be one of the major keywords that the web page is trying to rank for. Anchor text is also heavily weighted in search engine algorithms, as algorithms look for the most relevant results for a search query and anchor texts are frequently relevant to the content of the landing page.

jolly19 wrote:

Anchor text is the text used to describe a link when turning it into a hyperlink using HTML or XHTML coding. For example, if a web page had a link which the web page creator wishes to hide under text, the HTML code will turn a word or a phrase into anchor text, and that will work just like a normal link would. Anchor text is a valuable search engine optimization tool because the word or phrase used in anchor texts can pertain directly to the landing page content, or be one of the major keywords that the web page is trying to rank for. Anchor text is also heavily weighted in search engine algorithms, as algorithms look for the most relevant results for a search query and anchor texts are frequently relevant to the content of the landing page.

If a web page had a link which the web page creator wishes to hide under text, the HTML code will turn a word or a phrase into anchor text, and that will work just like a normal link would.

Anchor text is the visible characters and words that hyperlinks display when linking to another document or location on the web. In the phrase "CNN is a good source of news, but I actually prefer the BBC's take on events," two unique pieces of anchor text exist for two different links: "CNN" is the anchor text pointing to http://www.cnn.com/, while “the BBC's take on events” points to http://news.bbc.co.uk.

Anchor text is the text that appears to a reader in a link to another web site. So in the first paragraph of this post, the phrase “Anchor Text Over Optimization Tool” is the anchor text for that link. Anchor text is important to search engines, as it is one factor they use in determining the relevance of a link in relation to search queries people might make for the page to which the link points.